85. Manaus, Brazil

85.

Manaus, Brazil:

As the plane circles for a landing, I can see that this is a big, modern city--but best of all to me is the white ocean-going ship I can see far below tied up and waiting at the city dock.

At the airport I give a disgusted taxi driver the last cash I have—an American dollar and some Peruvian change—for a short, fast ride to the dock. I still have a few traveler’s checks, but in my haste to reach the ship--which may be leaving momentarily-- I have not changed any of them into Brazilian currency.

The beautiful big white ship at the dock is the “Anna Nery”, a luxury cruiser bound for Rio de Janeiro.

They have a berth for me so for the last thousand miles or so of the Amazon, I’ll enjoy excellent food, private stateroom with shower, stewards, swimming pool and all the accouterments of la dulce vita. No problem--the purser cashes a traveler's check and for only ten times the cost of the first thousand miles I get the royal works.

What a fantastic bargain!

I dress in my only surviving jeans and shirt--hoping to be mistaken for an eccentric American millionaire--and amble to the dining salon feeling mighty like a king.

The chief steward places me at a table of English-speaking Brazilians so I will feel more comfortable. Dr. Jose, an M.D. from Sao Paulo, welcomes the eccentric American millionaire to his table with a gift of several small aquamarines from Minas Gerais. The good doctor’s charming wife and lovely daughter chat with me politely in flawless English.

The chinaware! The silverware!! The food!!! A couple of days ago I was practically fighting for my life, eating slop, sleeping flat on a steel deck, tormented by mosquitoes--and now I am in the very Womb of Luxury!

These changes are doing something to my head!

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84. Above the Amazon

Above the Amazon


84.

I can’t afford to stay in this expensive town until the next down-river boat leaves so I catch a plane for the middle third of the big river. The river shrinks as the plane flies higher. The silver ribbon on the deep green carpet below is so much easier to handle.

No wonder tourists like to fly from one interesting place to another! All that boring in-between country is just too much trouble.

The Swedish businessman seated beside me tells me what it’s like to sell refrigerators to the natives far below. His wife is happy in Sweden with the big paychecks he sends home. I’ll bet she is too! He gets off when the plane lands in Leticia and a Portuguese-speaking gentleman takes his place. I always thought Portuguese was similar to Spanish, but I can't understand a word he says.

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83. Iquitos, Peru

83.


Iquitos, Peru:

Rubber (not Robber!) barons built this city about eighty years ago and it is pretty strange.

There are about six square blocks of tile-fronted three-storied buildings in a sort of “baroque-modern” architectural style surrounded by a few acres of dilapidated shacks surrounded by steaming jungle and it has an airport.

I spend an interesting few days looking around.

The language is still Peruvian Spanish and the town is easier on a traveler than Pucalpa

In the evenings, the streets fill with cycles, cars, taxis and people. The most popular shops here are fabric shops. The mostly handsome, brown or black, well-dressed citizens apparently love costume.

I am tall in comparison to the other men here though I am average in America.

The tourists, such few as there are, lounge in one or the other of the two high priced hotels in town drinking tall cool ones all day and boogying all night.

There is an “Amazon Museum” for the curious, but the muggy climate isn’t kind to their collection of stuffed birds, animals, reptiles and fish.

If you want to see something really scary though, try viewing their moldy stuffed boa constrictor with red glass bead eyes, massive jaws and a body like a tree trunk.

About the man-eating piranha fish, the forty-five pound killer frogs, the murderous Indians with blow-guns and all that which you have heard about and seen in the movies—well, there is a riverside lodge near here where professional natives put on a safe “wild Amazon” show for rich tourists -- but it is too expensive for this traveler to visit so I miss the whole savage thing.

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82. Public Health Risk Solved

82.

Public Health Risk Solved

The Canadians have convinced the captain that he should contact the health authorities before allowing anyone ashore since there may be a risk of spreading the German’s hepatitis, so the captain anchors offshore until some medical people come out. When they eventually come aboard they don’t have the necessary hepatitis vaccine to give shots to the passengers and crew, but they do have plenty of smallpox vaccine so they give everybody a shot of that and we all allowed to go ashore.

The Canadians and I don’t get the shots since we have W.H.O. card proof that we have already been vaccinated for smallpox.

I leave the boat without the girl and that may be a mistake since I am sure I will go a long way to find another like her.

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81. Marriage Proposal

81.

Marriage Proposal

There’s a sixteen-year-old Peruvian girl in first class who has been flirting with me.

She’s cute, with gold-capped teeth which sort of sets off her pretty smile.

Her brother, a youth of fourteen, tells me she wants to marry me and even produces an engagement ring which he has made of glass beads and copper wire.

I’m flattered. Wouldn’t she make a terrific souvenir of the Amazon Jungle?

But when the captain hears of the proposed engagement, he banishes me to the steerage below. It seems he has his own plans for the girl, but he shouldn’t be so greedy. He’s already got three young girls living with him in his cabin!

I spend the last night aboard with the common herd below in “Second Class”. I have taken the whole marriage proposal thing as the harmless play of some kids, but I find out the girl is absolutely serious. Sixteen is the proper age for a woman to marry down here and she is looking for a suitable man and I qualify.

Some of the boat’s crew has heard about the proposed marriage and follow me below and hassle me in various ways. They want to see how tough Americans really are and I am the only one handy. I am pretty weak from more or less constant diarrhea and am no fighter anyway but I manage to bluff my way out of any violence--lucky for me since I would certainly lose! I am also more or less saved from the toughies by the sighting of city lights in the distance: Iquitos—the end of the journey for this boat.

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80. Party on Board

80.
Party on Board

The next evening there’s a big party on the boat. The owner has come aboard and wants to celebrate.

The Canadian challenges all comers in first class (and me) to an Australian-style beer-drinking contest.

When someone yells, “Go!” we pick up and gulp a full glass of beer and the first one to bang the empty glass back down on the table wins.

Well, it’s no contest. The Canadian snatches up his full glass, inhales the brew and returns the glass to the table in one lightning motion. I never saw anything like it. So we practice with him, trying to improve our style, until we’re all smashed. The Canadian, who usually speaks only English, is speaking fluent Castillian, the boat owner, who speaks no English, is coming on like Winston Churchill. I’m speaking Chinese and everyone understands! This proves my new theory that The Australian Drinking Contest solves the problems of international communication.

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79. Monkey in Hand

79.

Every few hours the boat ties up to the shore and men unload cargo like bags of cement and cartons of Chicklets chewing gum.

The Canadian couple and I go ashore to explore the sun-faded villages.

The village inhabitants are dressed from a Sears catalog and the houses have plank walls with thatch roofs. There are no regular streets and no vehicles except an occasional Honda 50 motorbike plowing through the mud. It’s a long way from Ventura Freeway.

The Amazon becomes very wide and the sunset very like a Kubrick’s “2001” time tunnel. The pink, yellow and blue sky mirrored perfectly by the flat water horizon.

At midnight the boat ties up at another village. The Canadians and I are attracted by the blaring music and lamplights of a village cantina and go ashore. As we guzzle a couple of warm beers a kid tries to sell me a baby monkey, which shits in my hand. Everybody gets a big laugh out of that!

A canoe-load of oranges arrives and the passengers buy out the lot in minutes. Though there are millions of mosquitoes, the evening is pleasant. I sit on a cardboard container to watch the unloading: more cement, more Nestle canned milk. The workers try to warn me about something, but before I can figure out what they are saying, the caustic soda leaking from the case I am sitting on eats my jeans! Goodbye old friends!

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78. Ship of Fools

78.

Ship of Fools

The captain allows me to stay on the upper deck (First Class) to keep the Canadians company, so I only see the German when I take him his meals.

Dinnertime! The second-class passengers line up—biggest and meanest first, then women, and then children and I take my place last in line—the polite American! I duck under the pig’s head hanging on a hook over the chow line, hold out plastic bowls for a portion for me and one for the German and go below to eat with him feeling mighty like a refugee.

Back on deck I look at the river and the jungle slowly moving by. On the shore a boy flings a spear at something in the water. Here on the river the circle of life closes even quicker than in Pucalpa. The strong live and the weak die. For human animals, strength means money. Money means health, security, food, women—life itself. The less money you have, the less of everything. No money and you’re dead. That’s the grim reality on this Ship of Fools.

I am being confronted with some pretty stark facts of life. Momma! Where are the police, the laws, the Social Security, the credit cards, the friends, the sanitation, the McDonald’s hamburgers?

The only things I have going for me are my fit body and my USA passport. And about that fit body, well, I hope I look a lot stronger than I feel because that original amoeba has staged a successful revolution in my intestines--but for my safety I can’t let any weakness show. I wonder what my colleagues back at the university are teaching today? My teacher, The Big Flow, is laying out some hard, practical lessons for me.

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77. Down the Amazon

77.

Down the Amazon:

Today we depart.

The boat is a seventy-foot, Diesel-powered, steel craft with two decks and steerage below—not new, but sturdy.

I go aboard the boat early in the morning but there is no rush. Humans in the tropics pace themselves to stay cool.

When I come aboard I ask for the captain and am told in an echo from Melville: “He’s above in his cabin and he’s as black as thou art white.”

From this captain I buy a second-class ticket to Iquitos for US $8.

There are three other gringo passengers and about forty Peruvian passengers making the voyage with me. The other gringos are a handsome blond couple from Canada and a young German man. The Canadians are energetic, rich young tourists and the German is broke and hustling a long way from home.

The German comes aboard accompanied by a very homely Peruvian girl. He leaves his backpack and goes ashore with the girl and his bedroll for an hour of sex. He tells me later that she pays him for the service and that is how he earns his passage as a second-class passenger but that girl is so ugly I doubt if it was worth it.

The German is not feeling well. He retires into the steerage below decks and ties up his cheap plastic hammock. The next time I see him the whites of his eyes are banana yellow—hepatitis!

I speak to the captain about it, but he makes no move.

In the dark hole where the German lies helpless the natives have started to steal his few belongings—first his pocketknife, then his spoon and eating bowl, then his clothes. Good grief! Never get helpless when you travel second class on the Amazon! When I bring him a bowl of the rice-slop that is dinner for we second-class passengers, he offers to be my partner. He suggests we buy a small boat in Iquitos and float the rest of the way down the river to Belem and the Atlantic, a mere 2,500 miles, then we will sell the boat for a fat profit! Good grief!

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76. Yet More Pucalpa

76.

Yet More Pucalpa

By the last days of the long week in Pucalpa I am getting VERY bored so I think about entertainment.

It seems to me that people often like other people for their entertainment value. If a person is highly entertaining he is often successful and has what he wants. A new arrival is often entertaining simply because he is new. His story, his “song and dance” are new, but he’d better keep it changing or people will get bored and he’ll be out of it, except with those who feel more comfortable with re-runs!

Old Picasso, for example—first he was a master of his craft and second—he kept people wondering what he would come up with next—and he was always ready with something far out!

Maybe it's best to forget the gawkers entirely and just live in a way which keeps you yourself entertained by all the changes life hands you—out in “Edge City” as Kesey calls it. It seems to me that life in Edge City would be most satisfying. The “together” people must live in Edge City.

But the over-ripe odor of Pucalpa is starting to get to me and Montezuma is collecting some more serious and very painful revenge in my guts.

I am not getting much done and am feeling pretty low, but I am staying alive and that’s half the chore most of the time.

Maybe the week I’ve spent here is like time spent in a concert of unfamiliar music—not much fun, but educational.

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75. Still More Pucalpa

75.

Still More Pucalpa:

I find a pharmacy and go in to buy some iodine to use as a water purifier.

The clerk is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

She is the Queen of Pucalpa! I wonder what kind of jungle future she has in store.

I’ve been trying to find a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” in Spanish.

I know the book pretty well in English and have discovered that I can read books in Spanish if I already know them in English so it helps my study of Spanish.

The town library has a collection of about 500 books and it is one of them. And guess what’s playing at the local movie theater? Yep, Just my luck! Alicia en la Pais de Maravillas, so I go ask the Queen of Pucalpa at the pharmacy to go to the movie with me.

She won’t. I tried!

And now a word about the locals:

Though there are no tourists on the street, there are still a few “professional natives” lurking about, but the men here are never professional natives.

Men wear western-style clothes, Japanese watches. European cologne and shoes--but there are a few tourist bait women who wear the traditional folk-costume: black and white kilt and white blouse.

In one hand they carry strings of Job’s Tear seed beads and in the other toy bow and arrows. I am the Tourist of the Week and since they must feed their children and since I am an American the prices are up.

Odd! These beads are exactly the same as the Job's Tear beads professional natives in Hawaii sell to the tourists there—for exactly the same price! Am I on to an international bead conspiracy?

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74. More Pucalpa

74.

More Pucalpa

The town of Pucalpa is comprised of two carless mud streets running parallel to the Amazon. There are lots of sleazy bars; a grubby movie theater and many small general merchandise stores. There are plenty of fairly well dressed, busy pedestrians and no beggars.

The life-cycle closes pretty fast here—what the humans don’t eat they throw, the dogs fight the pigs for the biggest scraps and what they don’t eat the zapalotes gobble--so there’s nothing left but shit, mud and the jungle—no civilized gaps like sewers in the chain.

My Spanish is improving from daily use.

I am watching the daily pig/dog/zapalote scrimmage when a guy comes up and tells me a joke in Spanish which I actually understand!

Joke: A zapalote is throwing up. Another concerned zapalote asks him what is the matter? “There was a hair in that shit I was eating!”

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73. One Week in Pucalpa

73.

One Week in Pucalpa:

How does one spend a week in Pucalpa--a town not known for culture, beauty or anything else?

The first day I spend searching for a place to stay.

This is a liberty port for Amazon sailors and rooms and beds are crowded but I finally find an empty bed in a small wooden cell of a room.

How to pass the rest of my week in Pucalpa?

Every day I go down to the “dock”, which is just the well-churned mud of the riverbank, and watch the longshoremen work.

I see hollow-log boats equipped with motors and filled with people which come and go like buses on land.

And I observe Zapalotes, big ugly vulture-like birds which slowly flap over to the centrally located riverbank garbage dump to fight the loose dogs and pigs for refuse.

It’s also entertaining to watch the pretty, brown, miniskirted Pucalpa girls navigate through the muck in their modish stack-soled shoes.

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72. Pucalpa, Peru

72.

Pucalpa, Peru:

I am awakened by the sound of women killing chickens.

As the light increases, the riverfront comes to life. Women get charcoal fires going and begin to prepare food to sell in their open-air eating stalls.

Soon brawny longshoremen arrive to eat breakfast--but the wind and rain get worse so they don’t stay.

I crawl from the wretched shelter of my truck and stroll casually down the beach in the rain.

The food the women have for sale looks and smells delicious but would probably kill me.

I settle for papayas that I can peel myself, and fresh, hot bread. I hope the recent baking will make the bread safe for my sensitive digestion!

When the rain stops, I go from boat to boat asking about passage down the river.

I discover that there is only one boat authorized to carry passengers down the river to Iquitos which departs once a week and it just left yesterday--so I must wait a week here in Pucalpa for the next sailing.

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